Three exciting new features coming to your Facebook

Published:11:09Friday 21 April 2017

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Augmented reality, virtual reality and a chat assistant that knows when you’re hungry – Facebook is making some big changes in 2017.

Launched yesterday by Mark Zuckerberg, F8 2017, Facebook’s annual developer’s conference, opened with some major new features coming to your Facebook page. Here are just three important new features set to change your Facebook experience.

Camera Effects Platform

“We’re offering a suite of creative tools to give our community of artists and developers the power to create a full spectrum of effects for the new Facebook camera, from simple photo frames to interactive effects and masks using the latest in augmented reality technologies,” says Facebook.

Facebook says that the Camera Effects Platform includes two products: Frames Studio and AR Studio. Frames Studio which is a global online creative editor, that allows you to design frames that can be used either as profile picture frames or in the new Facebook camera. AR Studio, now open for beta applications, can be used to create masks, scripted effects, animated frames and other AR technologies that react to movement, the environment or interactions during Live videos.

The new tool will give developers the power to build augmented reality tools for the Facebook camera and create a more interactive and fun experience for users to take and share photos.

Facebook Spaces

Create a digital avatar to hang out with friends in a virtual hangout. Facebook’s new virtual reality app will make it feel like you’re in the same room as friends, or on the same beach, garden or park – the new VR app can transport your avatar anywhere.

“Facebook Spaces lets you easily phone a friend in the real world with Messenger video calling, so you can bring even more people into your VR space,” says Facebook. “They can answer your call on their phone to instantly open a window into your virtual world.”

Facebook Spaces has a tonne of features for friends to hangout in a virtual universe – naturally there’s a selfie stick so your avatar can even take a picture of itself.

Messenger features

Facebook states that its Messenger Platform has more than 1.2 billion people, 100,000 developers and 100,000 monthly active bots, and 2 billion messages are sent between people and businesses on Messenger every month, so it’s no wonder they’re making major new add ons and improvements to their ever popular platform.

Messenger’s new AI assistant, M, for example will sort out your dinner plans via delivery.com. M will jump into a Messenger conversation with friends if you’re discussing dinner plans and sort out the order and even payment.

The new Chat Extensions for Messenger which will also help businesses improve their operations. The latest extension will allow multiple people to chat with the same business at the same time. Users will be able to directly add in a chat bot to their Messenger group thread and share the conversation.